by Ian Williams
I wandered lonely as a cloud, that’s not me. That’s the Bard.
There’s only one Bard.
Right, listen. I wandered lonely as a cloud / and to the deepest sea / to find to find to find someone / who was finding finding me. Good, huh? That was all I had for a while but then I got a second wind when the stewardess came round with nuts. Her mother departed up above / in a paroxysm of pain. Paroxysm, Edgar raised his eyebrows, just came to me. Up into the clouds she went / Saying Felicia’s name. Poetic licence, Edgar commented. He raised his cigarette high for the finale: But down, down, down came the rain / And washed the spider out / And now the little girl / lives with me in the clouds.
You wrote that all by yourself? Felicia asked. She set a glass of grapefruit juice in front of him.
Believe it. He gave the napkin to her.
She sat on his knee. She reread the poem. It was terrible and he seemed to know it yet also seemed to be hoping that she didn’t know it.
She said, Out and clouds?
Out, cloud, out, cloud, he said.
He blew his smoke the other way, then he asked, Are you going to put your head on my shoulder? and began rubbing her forehead and he kissed her until the ice melted and made the top of the grapefruit juice watery.
210. CRY
Heather
Heather clutched Felicia’s hand and cried, Don’t leave me, don’t leave me. God, don’t leave me.
She had told a lie that she needed to confess. She felt like the waves wouldn’t subside until she confessed and they threw her overboard to be swallowed by a whale. The lie she told her mother was that Bruno had driven to Brampton to see her and that when she took off that night it was to be with him. Of course, he would deny it. Of course his parents would say he was accounted for. Alibis. Of course they’d do anything not to financially support a kid for eighteen years. She had ended her speech to her mother with a whimper meant to invoke pity for the suffering of their gender. The unspoken words were, I’m telling the truth, Mom. Don’t you believe me?
211. RECTANGLE
Felicia
Heather’s cries crossed from sobs into dry retches. Her mouth prolapsed into a rectangle, so the inside of her lips was visible to the gums. Felicia patted Heather’s forehead dry, wiped her nose, her cheeks. She did not leave again, stopped updating the men, whom she imagined in the waiting room, pacing around a cage, flicking their tails, then falling asleep on top of each other.
212. EPIDURAL
Felicia
You have to hold still, Felicia said. You don’t want the needle to break in your spine.
Horror on Heather’s face. Was it needle, spine, or break? A very sensitive generation, this one.
It’s not too late to change your mind, Felicia said. Heather had rejected her earlier advice but Felicia gave it one more shot. Pain was ordained since Eden. I wouldn’t take no epidural if I was you.
She knew of someone from her village in the small unrecognized island who went abroad and took an epidural and the odds were one in ten thousand that she would be paralyzed and she was the one.
213. HOO-HOO-HAA-HAA
Heather
They didn’t think she was worth teaching how to breathe, was that it? It was stupid anyway, this breathing business. It’s not like there was a right way to breathe anyway. She didn’t want to breathe anyway. She didn’t want to go to those classes anyway. Not with her dad. Gross.
Not with Army either because she didn’t want to appear among the older women in track pants as a teen pregnancy. They would regard her not as a woman who happened to be pregnant, but as a teen pregnancy.
She made the point in college, years and years later: Person who is incarcerated. Person with a disability. Not pregnant woman but woman who is pregnant. Person first.
214. BACKSEAT
Heather
Heather didn’t tell anyone, except Army, that she had been raped—sexually assaulted—because in her heart of hearts she believed that she had invited multiple penises into her body, that if she hadn’t decided to take off with Skinnyboy none of this would have happened. In theory, she knew she shouldn’t blame herself (years later, enrolled in a State College, she understood the psychology of victimhood, Patty Hearst with gun and beret) but still when she boiled facts down, the conversation went like:
Were you raped?
Yes.
Where were you raped?
In a car near Lake Ontario.
Would you have been raped if you didn’t go to Toronto?
I don’t know.
Would you have been raped if you didn’t go to Toronto?
Maybe. Anything could happen.
Would you have been raped if you didn’t go to Murmur’s show?
He could have raped me behind the church or dragged me into the mall bathroom.
Would you have been raped if you didn’t go to Toronto? Yes or no, Heather. No.
Speak up.
No.
215. HOO-HOO-HAA
Heather
She was an unwed mother too. Don’t forget that. She was a teen pregnancy and an unwed mother and the pain here it comes again are you serious?
216. BYE, BYE, MISS AMERICAN PIE
Felicia
If she could bear some of the pain for the girl, Felicia would. She would slice its syrupy filling onto a white plate and serve some to Oliver and to the ex, because no good mother would let her daughter run wild, yes I’m judging you, and a sliver for Army so that he would never touch a girl until he was married at twenty-seven, such a good age for a man to marry, and then pieces for Heather and herself, and grasp Edgar by the back of the head and slam his face into the remainder.
217. MIRROR, MIRROR
Heather
The boys had rested and were back for more. Inside her the skinniest one of all was spasming his little death for dear life as if the rape had gone into remission until this most aggressive recurrence of poisoned fruit. Something like that. A colourful Ferris wheel.
218. RELIGION
Heather
You believe in that stuff? she asked Skinnyboy.
Yeah, I guess. He shrugged. I believe. But not like a redneck.
They were on his bed or in a store or a parking lot or in his car. The anticipation of pain was clearing her memory.
He asked, Don’t you think there’s a God?
Ask me that now, she said from her hospital bed. She believed the emptying of her body into car pockets and parking lots and her father’s truck and now a hospital bed had a divine origin.
219. THE LIGHT
Felicia
Ask you what now? Felicia dried Heather’s neck.
Am I close to done?
But Felicia misheard. You’re not dying.
How close do I have to get to death without dying before this thing gets out of me? I’m not Nefertiti.
220. LAST WORDS
Edgar
In the hospital room, that endless first night, he had told her that apart from Schatz, the rest of Mutter’s vocabulary consisted of varieties of pain, der Schmerz, das Leid, der Kummer, die Qual.
So starke Schmerzen.
And then she let those go, dropping down to the article: der, das, die.
It had been the same with his oma.
221. FIRST WORDS
Edgar
Unknown.
222. HOW WAS SHE TO KNOW?
Felicia
While Edgar was out smoking, Felicia turned the chairs to face each other and placed her feet on the chair that was formerly his.
When he came back, he asked, Are you going home?
She shook her head.
Then, he said, implying that he wasn’t either. He looked at her feet in his chair before settling on the floor with far too much effort and drama for a man between thirty-five and forty-five. And once he was down there, he shuffled and groaned lightly, raising one butt cheek then the other.
Sit in your chair, she said but did not remove her feet.
He
protested.
We past politeness.
Edgar rose with much effort. Felicia moved her feet to one side of his chair and crossed her ankles. She patted the side of her chair for him to do the same.
She took off his shoes and instantly regretted it. Perhaps they weren’t past politeness after all. But soon he had fatigued her receptors and she could smell nothing and hear nothing and see nothing.
223. MED SCHOOL GENDER QUOTAS
Heather
No man should be a doctor. Not just an obstetrician but a doctor. No man understands nuclear fission in a uterus.
224. REVISITING THE OPTIONS
Heather
She would be willing to die for this child because she almost died having this child.
No way she was giving this baby up. Have your own damn baby if you want one.
225. SKIPPING CLASS
Heather
How were all the other girls her age spending their week? Not lying on blue sheets with their legs open.
Okay, maybe a few of them were.
You have no idea, Heather thought at them, you have no idea what happens elsewhere, by which she meant inside of you.
226. PINK DISPOSABLE RAZORS
Heather
She hadn’t shaved her legs, because it was difficult bending around the baby-belly and also because it was winter. She was conscious of the hair on her legs as she prepared to be inspected by a man who could be her father.
227. PAIN HAS AN ELEMENT OF BLANK.
Heather
228. IT HAS NO FUTURE BUT ITSELF/ITS INFINITE REALMS CONTAIN/ITS PAST.
Heather
229. JUST CUT ME OPEN
Heather
Why isn’t it working? Cut me up. Feed me to the dogs.
Nobody going to cut you open, girl.
Don’t let go.
Nobody letting you go. Once you pushing, it almost over.
230. EVIL LAUGHTER
Heather
Her father was out there thinking she got what she deserved. Her mother said she was going to come and didn’t. Felicia stabbed her in the back with a poison needle. They all tricked her into dying. In the background, they all plotted her death as part of the German expressionist film with weird shadows that they had been shooting for the last seventeen years.
231. WWED
Oliver
She said she’d come to help after the birth, Oliver said, referring to his ex-wife.
The baby’s early, Army said.
They were still in the small hospital waiting room outside the birthing rooms. Army was using Oliver as a pillow. He lay the back of his head on Oliver’s shoulder and extended his legs outward on the vacant bank of seats.
Yeah, but if I told her to get on a plane and—
You know how much one of those get-me-on-the-next-flight flights costs?
Let me put it this way, Oliver began again. When he was uncertain, he could quickly come to a decision by asking himself, What Would Ex-wife Do? And naturally he found merit in the opposite course. If she called me and told me Heather was in the hospital, I’d be in my car driving to Massachusetts right now. Oliver clapped and slid one hand forward. Fast.
Me too, me too. But let’s face it. There’s nowhere for her to stay.
That’s not why, Oliver said.
And what she gon’ do once she gets here? I mean, what’s she really going to contribute to the little GDP we have going?
Oliver imagined the ex as she surveyed his new situation. She would find Oliver living with a slender woman who—imagine—cooked, cleaned and had a job and a boy who called him mister and was already begging to drive his truck.
She don’t want to stay with you, Mr. O, Army continued. No offence. Once was enough.
232. AKIN
Heather
Did her mother really lie on her back while a cackle of hyenas tore open a zebra inside of her? Did Felicia when she was her age? Why didn’t someone say something? How could this ring of sabre-toothed fire not have come up before?
233. BECAUSE
Heather
Would she have believed a woman who told her not to have children?
234. TRUE
Heather
Everything comes out, Heather told Army later. Not just the baby. Everything down there. You can’t help it.
Ach, Army said, as German a sound as he had ever made.
However Heather was beyond being disgusted.
235. AIR
Heather
The baby made no cry. It didn’t move for a long second.
Underwater voices. Felicia looked worried.
It was being taken toward a sink.
Doesn’t she have to cry? Heather asked.
He, I think, Felicia said.
Why isn’t he crying?
He doesn’t have the strength yet, Felicia said.
236. EACH OF THEIR MOTHERS WORE HOSPITAL WRISTBANDS, NOT TOE TAGS, TO IDENTIFY THEM IN CASE THEY GOT LOST OR MIXED UP AMONG THE JAZZ.
Felicia
March 14, 1995. 4:40 a.m.
3 lb, 8 oz.
237. LONG DISTANCE
Oliver
After. But not immediately. Oliver called the ex-wife and Hendrix answered.
Did Heather have the baby yet? Hendrix asked.
That’s why I’m calling. Put your mother on the phone.
Boy or girl?
Boy, Oliver said. Hendrix, this is long distance.
Is Army there? Can I talk to Army?
238. FOR THE ANTS
Hendrix
The baby was born with a lot of dark, straight hair.
239. UNTIL WE FIGURE OUT WHAT HEATHER IS GOING TO DO
Oliver
The ex-wife was angry that Oliver expected her to have been there.
Am I supposed to just know that she went into labour? she asked.
Nobody’s blaming you.
You said that I should be there—
You should.
Yet you didn’t tell me. How? By teleporter? I just twinkle my nose and magically appear?
Are you and Hendrix coming or not?
God knows the stress you put the girl through to have the baby all by herself so early.
Yes, I threw her down the stairs and the baby—
Wouldn’t surprise me.
Are you coming or not?
Let me speak to Heather.
Oliver gave Heather the phone and went to stand with Felicia near the window. He knew the ex would not come. He didn’t want her around. He had this situation under control. But he wanted her to declare to everybody that she had no maternal instincts whatsoever.
Isn’t that what you would have done? Oliver asked Felicia.
Felicia cleared her throat.
I mean, any half-decent woman.
I wouldn’t send my child away in that condition.
Oliver accepted that. Then he expressed to Felicia that this was typical behaviour from the ex-wife. Talked a good game, but when it was time to act, except for the preparation of various salads for family picnics, she was nowhere to be found.
They let you make a long-distance call? Felicia asked. In my time—
You’re missing the point.
240. NAMED
Army
Later in the morning, to make an entrance into Heather’s recovery room, Army pretended to hold a baby while beatboxing Chariots of Fire and running in slow motion. He announced, They’ve got Chariot on display in the baby room.
What? Oliver woke up.
The baby. Nobody was naming the baby, so. His name’s Chariot. Strong Bible name.
Chariot’s not a name, Oliver said.
It’s in the Bible.
You didn’t write that down on the birth certificate? Felicia asked.
They said I couldn’t, Army said. Army launched his hand into the air like a plane. You get it? He’s gonna fly over this thing.
Chariot, Heather said.
241. 2 KINGS 2:11
Army
And
it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.
242. I’M GONNA RIDE IN THE CHARIOT
Heather
He went up to heaven in a chariot, Army finished explaining.
So that means the baby, Oliver began,
Chariot. He has a name now.
will die.
No, Army said. Elijah didn’t die.
Translated, Felicia yawned out. She had laid her head on Heather’s bed. Like Enoch.
But, Oliver said, he went up to heaven, which still means that he—
Chariot.
Chariot, Heather confirmed, and when she said the name a second time, she couldn’t entertain the thought of the child’s death anymore.
Chariot, Oliver said, gets taken away.
Read your Bible, Mr. O. Nobody dies. I mean, Elijah doesn’t. He gets in the tricked-out chariot and is like, Peace out, to everybody then he blasts off to heaven to live forever. That’s like Bible 201.
243. MAYBE IT, CHARIOT, COULD SLEEP FOR A LONG TIME
Oliver
No one wanted the baby to die. It was premature, so tiny and yawny and unaware of its dramatic history that it aroused tenderness in Heather and Felicia and Army.
But Oliver felt like a thirteenth godmother among them. He couldn’t shake the feeling that life would be easier (for who?) if the baby died (for everyone).
244. IN THE MORNING, LORD
Oliver
We can name the baby Elijah if you want, Oliver said. Not Chariot.
I kind of like Chariot, Heather said.
Think of him in school, Oliver said. It was the first time he had imagined the baby as a child, with an oversized knapsack heading up the stairs of Heather’s old elementary school.
Call him whatever you want, Felicia said to Heather. Where I come from a child does have a proper name and if you want to give him a nickname then you can give him a nickname.